Ardour takes 2 minutes to start

That says it all. Ardour takes two minutes to start. I recompiled it again and it still happens. No errors appear when I start it from a terminal. It just takes two minutes to start.

I have no clue about this one. I'd appreciate any help. I don't even know what information to provide. I can't think of anything relevant. I updated my Wine and system in general recently, but everything else that I do with audio works, including JACK.

This is the entire output from the terminal from starting Ardour, opening a project, playing it (which worked fine at that point), and opening Rosegarden, at which point Ardour goes psycho and sticks its head in the sand as I described earlier.

@audiodef: the output on stderr or stdout is almost never useful for debugging. Its not possible to debug your issue without you running a debug build of Ardour, which its unlikely you have unless you built it yourself.

The major problem in your case is that you are using the Wine-VST build, which is downright difficult to debug. I would suggest getting on IRC and seeing if there is anyone to help you there, but I wouldn't hold my breath as I can probably count on one hand the amount of people with experience debugging the VST builds of Ardour, and I am not one of them sad to say;)

I don't know if this has anything to do with why Paul is fed up with Gentoo, at least as far as Ardour goes, but I now have to agree with him. Gentoo is still my main OS, but I'm seeing if setting up Ubuntu for my audio work makes things more stable. I seriously do not need shit blowing up when I need to work. Or rather, I don't mind if it does as long as it's a problem that has a chance of being fixed while I learn something. ;-)

You can give ubuntu a shot or Fedora too. My advice is to stay away from ubuntu studio, in my experience I have had quite some issues in the past with it, using plain ubuntu and self compiling evrything is and will always be better than ubuntu studio.

If compiling and configuring is just too much then go for DreamStudio like macinnisrr says or try gmaq's A/V linux. These are two 100% Ardour users just like us, who rolled their own linuxes for this purposes, there can be no more guarantee that things will perform and work better than other distros.

After spending an entire day effing around with Gentoo, I'm about ready to go to bed in tears. Ardour still craps out when I open the programs I need to go along with it, namely Rosegarden and Patchage. This happens with ardour2, not ardourvst. I don't even want to bother checking ardourvst on this setup again.

Ubuntu Studio and regular Ubuntu crapped out on nvidia drivers, of all things.

FFS!

I'm going to try the above-mentioned distros. If those don't work, please send the men in the white coats, for I shall have gone stark raving mad.

...

OK, more so than usual.

Compiling and configuring, well I love doing it, but when things consistently don't work, it drives one a bit buggy - pun intended.

One peculiar thing about ArdourVST is that it will choke and puke on processing too many new VST .dll's at the same time. It needs to write a small '.fsi' file to use the VST.dlls properly. I see in the log you posted that it failed to get the VST information from some of your plugins. It could conceivably take several starts of ArdourVST to work through processing the large number of plugins during which it will try for several minutes and then just horribly die on you.

The secret is to add one Windows VST .dll at a time, launch Ardour from the terminal and see if it successfully integrated the VST. It is important to mention that some VST's will not be compatible at all by fst (the vst enabling library) within Ardour and will never work, this is repetitive and time consuming but the only way to ensure a smooth start with ArdourVST.

For the record since it was mentioned earlier in this thread, AV Linux ships with several free Windows VST's included with their accompanying fsi files so you can even launch and use ArdourVST from the LiveDVD with no hiccups. In my personal experience ArdourVST 2.8.11 with a carefully selected set of VST's is rock solid. YMMV based on which dlls are used and which version WINE you are using as well.

I should mention that because Dream Studio is Ubuntu based, you'll probably have the same Nvidia issues, although I suspect it's because you're using Ubuntu 10.10 (or UbuntuStudio 10.10, or Dream Studio 10.10 for that matter) and the nvidia-96 drivers, which is a known bug. If you want to give Dream Studio a shot (or Ubuntu, or UbuntuStudio) and those drivers are the problem, I recommend using 10.04 LTS instead. Or just use AVLinux ;-)

Again, I dont rely in Nvidia from repos, I download the official installer and latest from Nvidia website, and build additional kernel modules for it if necessary, which with repos its just too much of a hassle. That way I also make sure I am running latest Nvidia drivers.

What I'm trying to get to is that I install ubuntu just as a base and then compile as I go along, more stable, no dependency crap and if something is broken I know it's my fault.

I have a suggestion for AVLinux. My regular user was unable to start jackd (via qjackctl) until I followed the instructions I wrote for Gentoo at http://audiodef.com/gentoo/proaudio/ProAudioForGentoo.php under the sections "System Settings For Audio" and "Testing Your System". I think these instructions should be added to a file that gets placed on the desktop of a fresh install - or better yet, have a little script run during the install to set this up.

I'll repost my suggestion in the appropriate place if someone can tell me where that place is.

Having a problem with Ardour on AVLinux now. When I open an existing project, there's no output. When I connect Ardour's master outs to my system's main inputs (an Onyx mixer), the master meter in Ardour shows a continuous warbling signal in the meter bars whether the project is playing or not, but there is still no audio.

On another project, I get wild distortion in the red (and there IS audio. Terrible, terrible distortion), but the signal fades when I hit stop.

Looks like a feedback loop, but where? In the first project I tried to open, I cut ALL connections and then reconnected ONE track. No effects, plugins or VSTs. This still happens.

You should not be having trouble running jack and having to change anything, if it worked correctly on the LiveDVD/USB it should work correctly on the install, If it's not working OOTB with realtime permissions something is definitely wrong from the get go. AV Linux is not perfect by any stretch but OOTB JACK permissions support is normally not an issue. The problem you are having with the arrangement that loads and maxxes out the meters is almost certainly a plugin problem. I have seen this with Calf LV2's in particular where an arrangement with older Calf versions was opened with newer Calf plugins on the system, if not Calf it is almost certainly a plugin causing this.

By Onyx do you mean a Mackie Onyx? In AV Linux you must add your user to the 'disk' group in order for firewire devices to work properly. I suggest you come on over to the AV Linux forum and we'll help you get this straightened out, In the meantime you may want to update Wine from here: http://www.bandshed.net/checkinstall/wine_1.3.7avlinux-1_i386.deb. In my experience this new version is a little better behaved than the 1.3.2 that comes on the AV Linux ISO. Did you try JACK with your onboard soundcard first? That would be an indicator if JACK or ffado are causing trouble with the Onyx. There is pretty detailed firewire HowTo here which may help as well: http://www.remastersys.com/forums/index.php?topic=516.0

Pop over to the AV Linux forum, take a deep breath and we'll help if we can...:-)